Teaching

Courses

Transnational Feminisms, University of Pittsburgh (2018)

This course examines the emergence of transnational feminisms in both feminist social movement practices and theories of difference. It poses a central question facing contemporary feminism: how do we move forward with the project of feminism given the challenges of social, economic, and geopolitical differences? Emerging out of Black feminist thought, women of color critique, and feminist critiques of globalization, transnational feminisms introduces the central theoretical debates shaping feminist concepts—such as intersectionality and feminist solidarity—and the challenges of practicing feminism in global and transnational contexts. Looking at both the theory and the practice, the course builds on the tensions between sometimes contradictory or competing ways that transnational feminisms are theorized and represented in contemporary feminist thought and activism.

Introduction to Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, University of Pittsburgh (2018)/Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies, Thorneloe University (2016-17), University of Toronto (2014)

This course introduces many of the major concepts, topics and debates that animate the field of women and gender studies. Centering on a transnational perspective, the course examines both historic and contemporary issues across geographic and social locations. Connecting students’ own lives with the lives and experiences of others both locally and globally, this course builds the foundations for applying a transnational feminist analysis to everyday life.

Introduction to Feminist Theory, University of Pittsburgh (2017-18)/Feminist Theories, Thorneloe University (2016-17)/Texts, Theories, Histories, University of Toronto (2015)

This course examines the theories that have shaped feminist thought and situates them historically and transnationally so as to emphasize the social conditions and conflicts in which ideas and politics arise, change and circulate. Reading key texts in feminist theory alongside their debates, the course will prepare students to apply and situate arguments in feminist politics within the historical trajectories of feminist thinking. Topics include: feminist consciousness, theories of gender, standpoint theory, situated knowledge, intersectionality, identity, transnational feminism, feminist solidarity, anti-racism, and queer and trans theories.

Sex, Race, and Popular Culture, University of Pittsburgh (2017)/Gender, Race and Class in Popular Culture, University of Toronto (2010 – 2015)

This course examines contemporary issues in popular culture, with a particular focus on gender, race, class and an explicit engagement with queer theory. Course materials and cultural sites will also pay special attention to questions of racism, colonialism, capitalism, and the body. The course combines key concepts and theoretical frameworks in critical theory and cultural studies with analyses of media and popular culture sites.

Gender, Race, and Racism, Thorneloe University (2017)

This course examines the relationship between race, gender, and sexuality in historic and contemporary formations of inequality. Beginning with the period of colonial expansion, the course traces how race, gender, and sexuality emerged through the making of European empire and later globalization and the spread of neoliberal economics and ideologies.Building on the fields of transnational feminism, postcolonial studies and critical race theory, the course interrogates how racialization and gendered forms of violence produce new subjectivities and identities, as well as new political projects (e.g. feminist decolonization movements, women of colour politics, and anti-racist activism)

Transnational Feminism and Digital Media, University of Toronto (2016)

This course examines the role of digital media in shaping contemporary transnational feminist politics and how digital media is in turn shaped by transnational feminism. Looking at contemporary feminist cultural practices, social movements and current events in the landscape of digital media, the course considers how new practices of feminist politics coincide with new technologies of governance and communication in a digital age.

Masculinities and the Human in an Age of Terror, University of Toronto (2016)

This course considers the ethical, political, aesthetic, affective and discursive approaches to examining masculinities in what we will call an “Age of Terror;” a period marked by the beginning of the “War on Terror” (2001-present) and made possible through the history of Western imperialism and colonialism. We will examine the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which masculinities shape and are shaped by the conditions of state securitization, war, terrorism, and violence in its spectacular and mundane forms. In particular, we will interrogate how masculinities and violence become key facets through which sexuality is deployed and negotiated in the period of late modernity.

Turning from the threat of the terrorist body and Orientalist constructions of gendered subjectivity of racialized masculinities, this course considers how the human is reconfigured in contemporary global politics of war and terror. The course will take up these questions in current events, literary and artistic productions, and film.

This course will examine the relationship between gender and culture across diverse contexts. From pop culture to subculture, from local to transnational contexts, the course considers how our world is shaped by our ideas about gender, and how gender shapes our ideas about the world. Tracing the origins of our ideas about sex and gender historically to the contemporary redefinition of gender, we will examine how gender connects to the body, sexuality, and social differences.

Diverse Masculinities, Wilfrid Laurier University (2014-2015)

This course examines diverse masculinities through feminist, gender and queer approaches that interpret masculinity as a shifting feature of gendered embodiment and social, political and cultural production. It considers how marginalized, transnational, and diverse forms of masculinities both shape, and are shaped by: conditions of violence, through practices of racism, colonialism, and war; transnational, diasporic and indigenous contexts; and neoliberalism, globalization and nationalisms.